Colorfully fearless: geometric bathroom

With all the near-disasters I've been talking about here lately, I thought it was time for a positive post. And another look at color in my small home.

This is my bathroom. What you see here is likely the original tile from the late 1930s, early 1940s. Black and white (or cream, as it is here) tile is very common from this period, and I wouldn't have been able to change it anyway. So I had a limited color palette to work with.

As I've mentioned before, I like cool colors in bathrooms and bedrooms, because I consider these places you want to feel relaxed. So I chose this pale bluish green, which is very calming. (I think its Benjamin Moore's Ocean Spray—2047-60—but I'm not sure.)

But that's just the base color. Then I had my talented friend, Jim Sperber, take a look. A long time ago I taught him how to do basic decorative painting, but he's far surpassed me since then. He's begun incorporating some of his abstract art into his interior work, and the result is amazing. For my bathroom, he decided to try something new, based on a geometric series of paintings he'd done a few years ago. He chose a pearlescent artist's paint as the over coat, which took the ocean spray down a notch and pulled in the cream colors of the tile. Then he painted concentric trapezoids on all the walls.

I love this room—it has texture, and depth of color. The underlying blue is calming; the overlay of paint and shapes adds flourishes of decoration. Now I'm just trying to figure out what else Jim could paint for me in his inimitable style…